Pain
by Sophia Bee
Summary: Some of my old Veronica Mars Fic - Veronica and Logan, Logan has some self-destructive tendencies


He'd learned a long time ago not to cry. To dig his fingernails into his palms, to bite his lip until he tasted blood, but never, ever cry. Crying was weakness. Crying was for girls. Funny those girls didn't get hit, so they didn't have to cry anyway. Trina would never figure that equation out as she laughed at him across the phone line, told him he was just trying to steal all the attention with his phony stories.

There is a fine line between pleasure and pain. Logan couldn't remember when he'd crossed the line.

He never liked the aftermath. It was like the ending of a bad movie: the sting of iodine against the cuts across his back; tragic tears wetting Lynn's cheeks as she gently cleaned his wounds between sips of gin and tonic. And he would lie there shaking, fist clenched, vowing this would be the last time. And no one would ever hurt him again until the next time the belt came out.

But there was a strange poetry in the event itself. The way the belt hissed as it cut through the air, the sound of Aaron's heavy breathing as he whipped it across the skin of Logan's back again and again; the sweat that beaded on Aaron's forehead.

Logan was always jumpy afterward, buzzing with energy. He would show up at the back door of the Kane house, eyes bright and so fucking turned on that he thought he'd explode. Lilly knew that look and would greet him by shoving her tongue down his throat, her hands pulling at his shirt and they would barely make it to her bedroom. The only thing he could do was spread her legs and fuck her until his pain was engulfed in Lilly white light.

And Lilly would laugh, her mouth swollen, eyes bright, head thrown back at the pure joy of Logan's rage, right before she sunk her teeth into his shoulder, and her fingers would dig into the marks on his back, making Logan's breath catch with something besides the want that blinded him to almost everything except the need to find release for the pressure that was building deep in his groin.

When they were done she got up and washed the blood off her hands. He'd loved her more than ever that night.

Lilly burned in a hundred different ways and Logan adored every single one because the pain of the Lilly Experience was one of the only ways he knew he was alive. So when she finally burned out, lying in a pool of her own blood, half her skull bashed in, he was left without the distraction of her pain. And without the pain there was emptiness.

Logan needed the pain.

He started to look for the pain wherever he could find it. One night he sat by the pool in the dark when he knew everyone in the house was asleep holding Lynn's lighter that he'd stolen out of her purse earlier, flicking it on and off then holding the flame up to his wrist, not moving it until he felt tears running down the side of his face. He applied the iodine himself, wincing as it stung the burn, and missing the sound of ice clinking against the side of Lynn's glass and the gentle touch of her fingers.

No one asked him about the gauze bandage on his wrist at school the next day. They all had their own ways to stop the feelings.

He'd needed Lilly because her pain had felt like salvation at the same time her kisses tasted like sin. Without her the pleasure had gone, at least that was what Logan thought, until the day he discovered that he could find pleasure in making others hurt as much as he did.

It was the way the pain rose in her eyes so quickly, the flush across her cheeks, the way her mouth fell open as his words sliced into her like the blade of a knife. And when she looked away and her head hung down a little, Logan felt the pleasure again and he couldn't help but twist the knife just a little further. For the first time since Lilly's death the pain was pushed to the back and Logan smiled at her humiliation, letting her pain suck his dry.

Veronica Mars was his new crack. He couldn't stop.

He'd think about her as the belt cracked across his skin, how she would hunch her shoulders and put her head down when she passed by him or turn around when she saw him coming down the hallway. And he'd smile.

Then one day her eyes met his in the hall.

He was leaning against his locker, Dick and Beaver on either side. She was walking toward him, bag thrown around her shoulder, and Logan heard Dick hiss "skank" under his breath. Logan opened his mouth to remind Dick that Veronica Mars was several steps below skank when she turned her head and their eyes met.

Logan's words never made it past a being a mere fleeting thought in his brain. Her gaze met his and he saw that the pain had gone from her eyes; the flush didn't crawl up her cheeks and she didn't look away. They burned at him with anger.

It was the first thing they'd shared since they'd shared Lilly.

Logan couldn't give her up, after all, Veronica Mars was his crack and like any addict he needed his fix. But she never looked away again and soon she pushed his words back with her own. And the burn of pleasure from her pain started to change into something else that Logan couldn't find a name for. And sometimes when his back was still stinging from the belt and his dick was aching for release and Lilly wasn't there anymore to fuck, he would think of Veronica as he touched himself and came with her name on his lips.

He was so fucked up.

It wasn't a completely illogical leap for him to be standing outside her apartment a week after Lynn jumped off the bridge. What was illogical was that she didn't tell him to go fuck himself. She just looked at him and he couldn't quite figure out what she was thinking. He was so used to seeing the anger that he couldn't understand anything else.

Logan would remember as he sat on his bed that night, staring into his dark room, picturing her face as she opened the door that Veronica had lost her mother as well. Maybe she understood his loss.

He'd always been worried what would happen if he lost his distractions. What would happen when the numbness of alcohol wore off? What would happen when Lilly couldn't burn away his pain anymore? What about when he couldn't fill his own emptiness with Veronica's pain? What would be left when he finally had to look at himself in the mirror with nothing to protect him?

It was when she held him in the lobby of the hotel, her fingers in his hair, the feeling of her breath rising and falling, the way she smelled, and Logan knew he'd found his newest distraction.

He'd loved her more than ever that night. This made him laugh a little when he thought about it because he'd never realized he'd loved her in the first place. Which was why the first thing he did when he got home was find a bottle of Aaron's best scotch, feel the burn down his throat then tip the bottle back and swallow until the numbness came.

Sometimes he would walk down the hall with a smile on his face for not other reason except that it was funny that he couldn't find the words to hurt her anymore, but for some reason he didn't need them. He'd lost the distraction that hurting Veronica provided but the pain didn't crawl back from the darkness, it lurked below the surface, and Logan found he could glance across the room at her during journalism and she'd glance back and that was all he needed to keep it there.

Until the day she kissed him on the balcony of the Camelot, standing on her tiptoes, unable to find the words they both wanted to say. He saw the doubt on her face as she pulled away, head tilted up to search his eyes. He stared back, searching for the anger and only seeing confusion and something else. And it was the most natural thing in the entire world for Logan to grab her shoulder as she turned, trying to leave him standing in a daze in the afternoon sunlight, because he wasn't going to let her have the last line of their little passion play.

Kissing her was different than kissing Lilly. Kissing Veronica was a slow burn spreading through his body as his hands gripped her hips and she tangled her fingers in his hair as his tongue slipped into her mouth and he pulled her even closer. Lilly had been salvation and sin and fire all mixed up and Logan had never known if truly loved her or if he'd just learned from Aaron to confuse love with pain.

Veronica was just salvation.

There is a fine line between pleasure and pain. Logan didn't remember when he'd crossed the line into pain but he did remember how it felt to cross back into pleasure. It felt like kissing Veronica Mars.


End file.
